A child has just been born and nobody looks happy - not even his
parents.

His tiny body is still smeared in blood. The newborn cries
incessantly, and so does the teenage mother. The baby weighs only 3,500
grams and is around the size of the palm of a large hand.

And that's
when the mother's trembling hands reach the child's frail neck.

She
closes her eyes and presses her thumb against the child's throat.

She
strangles him.

A child who arrived in the "civilized world" some 45
minutes ago, must now leave it. The nurse puts the child's corpse in a
plastic bag and takes it out of the clinic.

Razia Zulfikar, a nurse working at a maternity home in the central
Pakistani city of Gujranwala, says hundreds of illegitimate newborn
babies are killed in the Islamic republic every day."An eight-month pregnant girl came to us just a few days ago. We didn't
want to admit her to our hospital. After repeated requests from her
family, we finally agreed to treat her. But we told the family
explicitly that we would not kill the child," Zulfikar told DW."We gave
the baby to the girl's family. Only she and her family know what they
did to the newborn, and how they killed him," she added.

A rebellious act

Pakistan is a majority-Muslim nation with a population of over 180
million people. Pre-marital relations are strictly prohibited in the
conservative country and are also frowned upon by society. There is
probably no bigger taboo than having a child out of wedlock. According
to Islamic laws, it is a punishable crime and the people committing
fornication could be sentenced to death. At times, the relatives of the
couple take the law in their hands and kill the adulterers.

Most of the
times, only the mother and the child are murdered.

Crime and punishment

According to the Edhi Foundation, a Pakistani welfare organization, more
than 1,100 newborns were murdered and dumped in garbage bins last year.
The organization says it collected the figures only from the country's
big cities, and the number could be much higher nationwide.

NEWBORN STONED TO DEATH, ANOTHER BURNED ALIVE, ANOTHER FED TO ANIMALS?FOR BEING BORN?WHY?A six-day-old child was burnt to death.

We also found the corpses of
babies who had been hanged, or who had been partly eaten by animals,"
Anwar Kazmi, a manager at the Edhi Foundation, told DW.

"I can never forget one incident. A woman left a child in front of a
mosque hoping that somebody would adopt him. But the cleric of the
mosque ordered the people to stone the child to death. I saw the
mutilated and torn body of the child myself," he recalled.

Cradles

The Edhi Foundation runs a unique project called "Jhoola," which means
"cradle" in Urdu. The organization encourages people to leave unwanted
children in its cradles instead of murdering them. It does not ask for
people's identities. One can put the baby in these cradles in the dark
of the night.

"I would like people who do not want their children to bring them to us
and to not kill them. We have more than three hundred centers with
cradles across the country. They don't need to be afraid of anything."But people are scared and feel intimidated by both society and state authorities."

KARACHI, Pakistan — Just days after she gave birth, Zaitoun says, her
husband killed the child, their first, because she was a girl.Two days after her daughter was born, Zaitoun says, she woke up to find
the baby gone. That afternoon, when her husband returned home for lunch,
she asked him what had happened. "I took care of it," he said.A few days later, she says she saw an ambulance crew pick up a tiny
corpse from a trash dump outside her apartment building.

In the six
months she had been living in Haryana Colony, a squatters' settlement
where some of Karachi's poorest families live, Zaitoun saw three other
dead babies removed the same way, she says".

"Most children found are less than a week old." "Murder is punishable with life imprisonment, but infanticide crimes are
rarely prosecuted and many police stations do not even acknowledge the
cases, AFP reports."